Mobile computing devices such as personal digital assistants, contemporary mobile telephones, hand-held and pocket-sized computers, tablet personal computers and the like are becoming important and popular user tools. In general, they have become small enough to be extremely convenient, while consuming less battery power, and at the same time have become capable of running more powerful applications.
Via a remote connection, various messages such as email messages can be sent and received. Other types of messages that may be sent and received include Short Message Service (SMS) messages, a standard for sending short alphanumeric messages (maximum 160 characters) to or from mobile phones in mobile communications networks. Such devices are able to store their received and other user data locally and/or by connecting to networks, including the Internet. In general, these computers and computer-based mobile telephones (such as those running Microsoft Windows® Mobile software for Smartphones) allow users to make conventional mobile telephone calls, access the Internet, send and receive messages and attachments, store contacts, maintain appointments and do many other things contemporary desktop computers can now do.
In certain enterprise scenarios, mobile devices are not assigned to individual users on a permanent basis, but are instead checked out on a temporary basis. For example, a delivery driver may check out a mobile device at the beginning of his shift and return it at the end of his shift. A driver on the next shift may then check out that same device and use it during her shift. While this arrangement works well with applications that the users can easily share, certain applications are user-specific, with the settings for those applications maintained in a registry on the device. This is one reason why more powerful personal computers and the like running contemporary operating systems allow users to log in under different accounts; each different user has personalized settings maintained in corresponding registry settings for that user, whereby users can preserve a great deal of customized information with their corresponding user account.
However, mobile devices are generally configured for a single user, essentially as a result of limited resources including storage. As a result, if the device is shared by users, such as in the example shift-change scenario described above, any device and account configuration information heretofore also has been shared (public) among the users of the device. This greatly limits an enterprise's ability to share devices while maintaining the users' privacy. For example, if email is one of the tools that a company wants to use to communicate with its employees, sharing is not practical with contemporary mobile devices, because if the device is configured with an email account for each user, each user can see each other user's email messages.
Reconfiguring a device to only have the current user's settings involves changing substantially more data than a username, and thus changing the device to provide privacy for each user is difficult. For example, different users' email accounts may have different incoming server names, outgoing server names, credentials and settings for each and so on. Without clearing out the most recent user's account settings (and any other stored account settings), and reconfiguring the shared device each time a different user wants to use it, the subsequent user is provided with access to the previous user's (or previous multiple users') email. Reconfiguration is an operation that requires a relatively sophisticated user, and thus sharing is not practical in most enterprises. What is needed is a straightforward way for computing devices (particularly those that do not allow individual user log-on accounts) to handle different accounts with respect to certain tasks without requiring conventional device reconfiguration, e.g., to clear previous account settings and add current account settings.